I spend all day staring at numbers and spreadsheets, to the point that I have certain facts and trends burnt into my eyes, wind up working two hours overtime to prepare data and then come home to be mobbed by our own little monster who wants her daily ablutions (”dada, bath!” :).

Work is genuinely interesting. I’m surprising myself that I’m enjoying a job so much that basically has me stare at numbers all day. I physically count stock to control discrepancies – it’s not right to say ”stock loss” – I’m of the opinion that there’s very little theft ongoing, and even if someone steals a t-shirt, it’s a dollar gone. In the long term I’ll worry about it, but for the time being I worry about stock movements that cause the disappearance of hundreds of dollars of goods, such as happened today.

It’s a normal thing that I might be up or down a certain quantity of stock because 90% of the time we can account for it. The other 10% of the time it’s been weird random stuff like stock being shipped off to a vendor without anyone telling me. On rare occasions though we are completely missing an item without any explanation. The boxes have upped and vanished. When this happens (four times in the past week) I have to do something extreme and crazy like doing a complete physical check of the warehouse where the goods would be.

As I enter the counts into a spreadsheet and put numbers together I can see here that our sales staff and account executives have been poaching from a stock line for vendor and customer samples, without creating an order so we can track it. Over there I notice that a recent order of goods has been very sloppily shelved. The goods are spread across several non-adjacent bins, rather than being in one. Most important of all, I can see that that the random number generator that picks out items to be counted is really and truly broken, which was the big fact for me. I’ve been convinced for the last month that it weighs goods to be selected. It picks more active lines and more active goods within those lines. The problem is that it includes a prior count as being activity, so the more an item gets picked, the more an item gets picked.

Nice.

Alright, I think that’s enough geeking over facts that very few mundanes will appreciate. And now onto everything else that’s going on in my life.

On media, pirated and otherwise I’ve finally, at long last, had a chance to…

…watch the Simpsons film. I’m still iffy on it as I’m not sure I like how the humour has changed since I watched it regularly.
…watch Bender’s Big Score. Futurama=cake!
…listen to the full season 3 Battlestar Galactica. Great work, as always, although I think everyone else at work is really sick of drums at this stage (sorry, Christine!).

And lastly, Mariah and I went to see Cloverfield on Sunday last. Holy awesome film. :/ I’m already waiting for the sequel.